Please, Mister Postman: Amazon.co.uk: Alan Johnson: 9780593073414: Books Please, Mister Postman Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: Bantam Press; First Edition edition (18 Sept. 2014) Language: English Product Dimensions: 14.3 x 3.2 x 22.2 cm Average Customer Review: Review "The best political testament I have ever read" (Peter Wilby New Statesman) "This boy can write…there’s nothing second-rate about his writing.

He is a natural" (The Spectator) "A wonderful elegy for a life that has only just passed into history... Beautifully written, affecting and sad" (John Rentoul Independent on Sunday) "A fascinating piece of social history" (Daisy Goodwin Sunday Times) "Johnson’s writing style is easy, relaxed, self-deprecating. His recall and eye for detail are impressive" (Chris Mullin Observer) "Full of delights" (Francis Wheen Mail on Sunday) "Like Johnson's previous memoirs, this latest instalment carries a first-class stamp" (Caroline Jowett Daily Express) "'Witty, self-deprecating, sometimes uproariously funny and sometimes unbearably sad. It shines like a candle in the naughty world of inauthentic politicians and public alienation" (David Marquand New Statesman) "Immensely readable" (Scotland on Sunday) "Beautifullly written... and vividly observed" (Daily Mail) Book Description By Number13 TOP 500 REVIEWER on 22 Sept.

2014 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase Alan Johnson in print is just as pleasant company as when seen on the `This Week' sofa - this is an excellent book; optimistic, often very witty, sometimes extremely moving and always very readable, cleverly written in a natural style with compassion and a wonderful sense of humour. It's a vivid picture of family life, working life and the Post Office, trade-unionism and traditional Labour politics in the years from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s; a fascinating and politically pragmatic journey through a time of great change. As well as the personal and family story, this volume includes a lot of detail about the day-to-day operation of a trade union and Post Office working practices, as you might expect. I found this very interesting but it is obviously different from the previous book. Highly recommended and I look forward to the next volume.

Please, Mr Postman: a Memoir by Alan Johnson, review: 'beautifully evoked' - Telegraph Please, Mr Postman: a Memoir by Alan Johnson, review: 'beautifully evoked' The second volume of Alan Johnson’s personal and political memoir is required reading 5 Please, Mr Postman is Alan Johnson's second volume of memoirs Photo: Jeff Gilbert By Sinclair McKay 3:15PM GMT 30 Oct 2014 The recent outbreak of hair-pulling between the Prime Minister and Tristram Hunt, shadow education secretary, explains why a book such as this invokes such a fierce glow of yearning. David Cameron has accused Hunt – and I paraphrase – of being a Labour posh boy who wishes to deny future generations his educational advantages. Hunt has responded by accusing the PM of being a “low-rent PR man”. The insults mirror one another perfectly: they are about a perceived absence of authenticity. This, the second volume of memoir from the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson , is an unintended rebuke to Westminster game-players.

In his first book, Johnson vividly invoked his childhood, the early loss of his mother, and being brought up largely by his elder sister in the Rachman slums of north Kensington. This volume begins in the same run-down streets in the late 1960s. Johnson, now a teenager, dreams of being a rock star, but his girlfriend Judy is pregnant and they are living, together with Judy’s daughter from a previous relationship, with her difficult mother in a house soon to be demolished to make way for the Westway motorway. Johnson gets a job with the post office and puts Judy and himself down for a council house. The only property they are offered is not quite where they had expected; a house on an estate with a grim reputation on the outskirts of Slough. Two local bobbies tell Johnson they wouldn’t think of living there. Nor, at this point, would any of Johnson’s readers. But the truth turns out to be very different. Johnson and Judy see the house and the garden – and they fall in love with it instantly.

What follows is a beautifully evoked account of ordinary 1970s life; neighbours socialise; cars and household telephones are acquired; there is QPR football on Saturday, and beer at the pub on Sunday lunch; there are kitchen parties involving pale ale and gin but not wine, which was a rarity then. And then there is Johnson’s work in the Post Office, and his round of deliveries near Burnham in Berkshire, which he makes sound blissful – including a lady farmer on his beat who makes her kitchen a kind of political forum for all the local workmen. The startling thing is that Johnson makes the union politics sound attractive too. Possibly because the postal union was more moderate (and indeed, judging by Johnson’s account, often the soul of conciliation), we hear less of the background roar of the decade; the coal strikes, the three-day-week, the sense of the nation’s heavy industry slowly being forced to its knees by technological advance, slippery management and aggressively intransigent unions.

Related Articles Mr Postmans round two is a first-class delivery | Daily Mail Online comments PLEASE, MR POSTMAN by Alan Johnson (Bantam £16.99) One day in June 1969, a young couple from London took the train to Slough where they had been offered a council house. Seeing two policemen, they asked if they could direct them to the Britwell estate. ‘We should do, we have to go there often enough,’ replied one. His colleague added he would not live there ‘for all the tea in China.’ When the pair finally found the house, passing huge ‘Keep Britwell White’ grafitti, their two-bedroom property had boarded-up windows and an overgrown garden. The second volume of Labour politician Alan Johnson's memoir follows him from teenage postman married to a single mother four years his senior through to national union official It was an inauspicious start to married life. But for Alan Johnson, raised in grinding poverty, it was an offer he grasped with gratitude. ‘We would make the Britwell estate our home,’ he writes.

‘Life there was good.’ RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share He recalled how his mother spent her life in barely habitable slums, dreaming of the day she had her own front door — only to be finally offered a council house two weeks after her early death, when he was just 13. The estate provides a backdrop for the second volume of the Labour politician’s memoirs, in which he goes from teenage postman married to a single mother four years his senior through to national union official — and marital separation — two decades later. A young Alan when he was General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union Like his acclaimed first volume This Boy, this is named after a Beatles song and beautifully written, a series of affectionate anecdotes and vividly observed sketches that conjure up a recent age slipped into the past. This time it is the Seventies and early Eighties, working in a public service barely changed over the previous century. Postmen — and they were all men when he started — wore traditional uniforms, were often ex-forces and central figures in their communities. He and his colleagues fed cats for owners on holiday, delivered magazines after surreptitiously reading them first and ate hearty breakfasts at farms during their round.

Meanwhile, they relied heavily on overtime and Spanish practices to boost pay packets. This is another elegiac slice of social history, conjuring up the days when drink driving was rife, postal workers saw the fax machine as a threat to their future and drivers had to ‘double declutch’ their clunky vans. So different were society’s attitudes the young couple gave a false wedding date to their new neighbours since his wife ‘didn’t want anyone to know that she had been pregnant when we married’. Abandoning ambitions of pop stardom after his guitar is stolen, the author educates himself by listening to the radio and reading — including a quality newspaper he hides at work ‘as if it were a pornographic magazine’. For all its easy charm, this is a less compelling saga than Johnson’s story of his tough childhood in post-war London slums. There is too much detail of postal shift patterns and rather dreary union politics. Yet Please, Mr Postman is still a first-class delivery, head and shoulders above most political memoirs with its self-deprecating style. ‘They dressed scruffy but talked posh. We dressed posh but talked scruffy,’ he says on meeting some middle-class militants. Alan aged eight.

He writes movingly about being raised in poverty By far the most moving chapter is about his sister’s husband Mike — ‘the kindest, gentlest, most decent man I’d ever known’ — who was a secret alcoholic, and killed himself in the basement of the shop where he worked. Johnson idolised his brother-in-law, who arrived in his life shortly before his mother’s death. ‘The tears I found it so hard to shed when my mother died have poured down my face a hundred times for Mike and for the awful, tragic end to his short life.’ It is indeed a tragic tale with Mike’s drinking — stashes of vodka hidden in the garage and garden shed — spiralling out of control amid worries over his job. Then Alan’s beloved and big-hearted sister crumbles into delayed depression during a summer holiday in Wales and he is needed to support the sister who for so long supported him. Then there is the subtle way this ‘militant moderate’ handles his political awakening. He admits to having no idea when he became interested in politics, yet his evolution emerges in a series of revelatory vignettes. These begin with a snooker-playing colleague who worked during a strike and was sent to Coventry.

‘In the canteen he would rise from the breakfast table hopefully, snooker cue in hand, but nobody would play against him.’ After five months Johnson left, during which no one ever spoke to this poor man. ‘For all I know his isolation lasted until his retirement,’ he writes. ‘I colluded in trying to break a man’s spirit and it’s something I’ve been ashamed of ever since.’ He watched as Labour politics turned nasty amid the hard-left takeover, saw through the posturing of Tony Benn, rejects the chance to buy his council house and uses a telephone on the desk of his union’s general secretary to symbolise the Thatcherite new order. His predecessor showed him this special white phone and said it was a hotline for ministers and senior civil servants seeking the general secretary’s opinion on crucial affairs of state. But during this beleaguered union baron’s decade at the helm, the phone only rang once. ‘The caller had been a woman asking if this was Sainsbury’s.’ Alan with now leader of the Labour Party Ed Miliband at a press conference in Westminster. Alan writes about having seen through the posturing of certain politicians such as Tony Benn during his long and varied career.

The memoir ends with Johnson parting from his wife and driving away from Britwell after 19 years ‘keeping my eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead’. Alan Johnson’s Please, Mister Postman: the best political testament I have ever read 2 October 2014 Alan Johnson’s Please, Mister Postman: the best political testament I have ever read This second volume of Alan Johnson’s memoirs brings to life a world in which postal workers fed cats while their owners were away and fetched coal for old folk. Sign up for our weekly email * Please, Mister Postman: a Memoir Alan Johnson Bantam Press, 327pp, £16.99 In a Guardian interview with Mark Lawson in May, Alan Johnson said: “I was a cabinet minister in five different departments and no newspaper ever asked me for my recommended summer holiday reading; no one ever asked me to review a book.” Because he hadn’t been to university, he was, he felt, categorised as an unliterary type. His award-winning memoir of his impoverished childhood, This Boy, changed all that.

Johnson became a literary star, as he had aspired to be when, at 18, he paid £5 to a vanity publisher to include a rather dreadful poem in Spring Poets ’69. Now comes a sequel taking us from teenage marriage and the start of his career as a postman in the late 1960s to marital separation and becoming a union-employed official in the late 1980s. This Boy included his father’s desertion, his mother’s death when he was 13, his 16-year-old sister’s extraordinary success in getting a council house for herself and her brother and a backdrop of violence, slum landlords and racial tension in 1950s Notting Hill. This volume tells an unremarkable story of work, marriage, parenthood and friendship in, of all places, Slough, best known for John Betjeman’s invitation to “friendly bombs” to fall on it. Yet so deft are Johnson’s writing skills that he wrests comedy, tragedy and acute social observation from such unpromising material. He brings to life a world in which postal workers fed cats while their owners were away and fetched coal for old folk.

The characters are vivid, the stories beautifully told. Among the best are the driving test examiner who, having failed Johnson four times, passed him on the fifth because “I’m sick of the fucking sight of you”; and a delivery to a closed order of nuns, when he descended to a gloomy basement, placed registered mail on a pulley-operated turntable and waited until it “slowly re-emerged bearing a signature, as if authorised by a divine hand”. Johnson never mentions “Selsdon Man”, Thatcherism or other abstractions that then dominated political debate. Nonetheless, this is a highly political book, making its points almost entirely through anecdote. For example, when Alan Tuffin took over as general secretary of the postal workers’ union in 1982, his predecessor Thomas Jackson showed him a telephone, on which ministers and civil servants rang when they wished to consult on matters of state. When Johnson succeeded him a decade later, Tuffin said nobody had rung during his term except a woman asking if it was Sainsbury’s. Nothing could better illustrate the unions’ sudden loss of power and influence.

On council house sales, Johnson writes only that he and his then wife did not, unlike nearly all of their neighbours, buy theirs. They felt lucky when they were “allocated” a council house – his mother had striven unsuccessfully for one throughout her adult life – and they felt “an obligation not to deny future generations that lifeline”. Another passage recalls how, during a strike in 1969, one colleague, a keen snooker player, carried on working. In the sorting-office canteen, “He would rise from the breakfast table hopefully, snooker cue in hand, but nobody would play against him.” This continued for many months. “I colluded in breaking a man’s spirit and it’s something I’ve been ashamed of ever since,” Johnson writes. In those two stories and many others, you have Johnson’s politics: a passion not for ideology or policy but for the values of his mother, who had so little yet told her children to be “polite and courteous and help those less fortunate than ourselves”. In an important passage, he reflects on Militant, the Trotskyist caucus that nearly destroyed Labour in the 1980s.

Johnson was briefly attracted to Tony Benn’s politics but Benn’s tolerance of Militant’s antics changed his view. It wasn’t, he explains, a matter of right and left but of right and wrong. By then working full-time for the union, he knew the most effective activists weren’t those who “postured and posed on the rostrum” but “men and women who quietly got on with . . . providing [an] intelligent voice for those they represented with no concept of themselves as working-class heroes and no desire to use their members as weapons in some kind of political crusade”. If Labour had gone into coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010, Johnson could well have emerged as prime minister. It is hard to believe a government led by a man with his history would have left itself open to charges of being “out of touch” with ordinary people. But we shall never know. Instead, we have this book, the best political testament I have ever read.

Alan Johnson appears at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 30 November Alan Johnson's Please, Mister Postman review | Books | Entertainment | Daily Express 15:34, Fri, Sep 26, 2014 Alan Johnson has written a riveting book [REX] It's the absence of such a quality which so limits and defines far too many of Westminster's hermetically sealed current generation. Alan Johnson is a rare exception. As this book reveals the former home secretary is a politician who could not be further removed from the identikit image of the policy wonk/student union-dominated Labour frontbench of which he was once a member. It is now a commonplace to say that Johnson is the best leader the Labour Party doesn't have. That widely held belief was reinforced by the first volume of his memoirs called This Boy. In it he told of the real poverty and deprivation in which he was brought up in 1950s west London with a feckless, negligent father who was physically violent towards his mother and ran out on the family when Johnson was a boy.

Even more remarkably, after his redoubtable but physically fragile mother died, his older sister took on the responsibility of a parent, hiding this fact from the social services so that they were not separated and taken into care. It was a tale straight from the heyday of Coronation Street's strong women characters, in the days before the soap became the more issue-driven pale imitation of today, and all the more remarkable for being true and communicated in such clear and compelling prose - another asset most politicians don't share with him. This latest volume takes up his story in the late 1960s when Johnson was married at 18 to an older woman with a daughter from a previous relationship. He makes a career as a postman in Berkshire, with rounds that include Dorneywood, the stately home that was the official residence of the then home secretary, while a colleague complains of the number of packets he has to deliver every day to a then unknown DJ called Terry Wogan. I colluded in trying to break a man's spirit.

It's something I've been ashamed of ever since Alan Johnson Having left school with few qualifications Johnson teaches himself through his voracious reading and describes his political awakening through involvement with the postal union (of which he would become general secretary). He is the sort of official who gives trade unions a good name but isn't afraid to recall how one colleague was given the silent treatment after working during a strike. "I colluded in trying to break a man's spirit. It's something I've been ashamed of ever since," says Johnson. He is also self-deprecating about his more zealous younger days when he pontificated to anyone who would listen about "my people" and being "at the service of the working class". "I blush now at this patronising nonsense but I can't deny that the idealistic little p**** in the tank top and flares was me." As with the first volume there is never a mawkish or self-pitying trace to Johnson, even when dealing with the book's most sombre episode: the suicide of his alcoholic brother-in-law, an episode that still haunts Johnson nearly 40 years later.

He is also very good on something many from a similar background will recognise: "My personality was steeped in the self-effacement that held back so many working class people." Johnson has more than overcome that handicap yet perhaps it is precisely the fact that he is such a fully paid-up member of the human race who has always put his hinterland first that has ultimately prevented him reaching the very top of politics' greasy pole. Like Johnson's previous memoirs this latest instalment carries a first-class stamp. Related articles Social justice is political pie in the sky | The Independent Comment Social justice is political pie in the sky Everyone talks about it, but no one seems to know what they mean by it, let alone how to achieve it Saturday 20 September 2014 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Good old days? Social justice had real meaning for those who lived through the war Getty One of the most interesting sub-arguments to float up to the surface of the Scottish independence debate took in the idea of social justice.

There was, naturally, a straightforwardly romantic side to the Yes campaign, built on a Burns-like vision of brooks and braes and bonny white heather, and there was, inevitably, also an economic-materialist side, built on doling out what remains of the oil revenues. But doing battle alongside them was a suggestion that an independent Scotland would make a fine crucible for a new kind of social democracy, differing from the old, discredited, Blairite model in its reluctance to suck up to capital and vested interests in such a shameless and divisive way. Eight months before a UK general election, the tocsin of social justice seems to be clanging a little louder – but only a little – above the political scene than once it used. It is, for example, a feature of The Guardian columnist Owen Jones’s new book about the Establishment, and a beguiling earlier version of it can occasionally be glimpsed in Please, Mr Postman – the second volume of the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s memoirs, published last week.

And yet defining it, here in a world where most abstract nouns once associated with politics (“liberal” for example) have gone through a kind of 180-degree turn in meaning, is notoriously difficult. So let us say that I am a Labour front-bencher urging Mr Miliband to advocate its renewal in next year’s manifesto. What am I proposing? Curiously enough, given the prevailing socio-economic conditions, the only way to begin is by establishing what it is not. Does social justice mean equality of opportunity? Not really, because in a landscape where most forms of advantage come built-in, equality of opportunity is a meaningless phrase: after all, you can (theoretically) sit the boy from Harrow and the girl from Grimepit Colliery Comprehensive side by side in the same examination hall, but in doing so you will have to ignore the fact that several factors beyond their natural intelligence are likely to affect their ability to shine. Does it mean a willingness on the part of the state to intervene in aspects of our national life?

No again, because no part of the national fabric is quite as distrusted as Leviathan and even quite sensible proposals to – say – renationalise the railways are laughed out of court should any Labour backbencher dare to suggest them. Is it something to do with higher taxation, then? No again, because all political parties are – understandably – terrified of suggesting that most of the things the public appears to want (greater spending on the NHS, proper pensions provision) will have to be paid for by the public itself. In the end the advocate of social justice is usually reduced to arguing that what he or she wants is “fairness” – a praiseworthy aim, naturally, but one unlikely to be accomplished without at least some consideration of one or two of the measures listed above. Which is a way of saying that many of the mechanisms by which the country is currently run are, strictly speaking, unfair, but that – as the Blair administration demonstrated in spades – fairness tends to collapse by the wayside whenever it looks as if its consequence might be a determination to stop oligarchs from pushing ordinary people around.

Social justice is a feature of a new book by Alan Johnson The historian, looking back at the development of post-1945 Britain, would probably conclude that there was a time at which the idea of social justice meant something sharp and hard and tangible, and that its high point came in the Labour government of 1945-1951 – a reforming administration, certainly, but not an extreme one, very few of whose innovations were overthrown by the Conservative government that succeeded it and whose mixed-economy standpoint eventually resulted in the cross-party fiscal hybrid known as “Butskellism”. But that historian would quite reasonably suspect that there was a tipping point in British history at which social justice became that much harder to obtain, and that the odds were loaded against it not only by the freedom allowed to capital but the licence allowed to labour. The Callaghan administration of 1976-1979, for example, run by an Attlee acolyte and containing dozens of genuine social democrats, was eventually destroyed by some of its own trades union affiliates.

As a teenager in the strike-bound late 1970s, talking to people in late middle age, one often used to hear that at some point in its recent history Britain had “gone wrong”; “Well, they got that right” my father once remarked, catching sight of Blur’s Modern Life is Rubbish by the cassette player. The people doing the complaining were usually arch-Conservatives. These, had they lived, would have been cheered by the successive volumes of David Kynaston’s history of the post-war years, whose latest tranche – A Shake of the Dice: 1959-1962 – was published last week. And yet, whatever the mistakes made by the Churchill, Eden and Macmillan governments a glance through Kynaston confirms not that these administrations were especially inept, but that the socio-economic conditions were such that almost any government of both left or right would have very little room for manoeuvre. For all the variety of his themes, and the well-nigh kaleidoscopic range of his detail, it is fair to say that Kynaston has a single subject. This is materialism.

The Britain he surveys is one in which, with a few painful exceptions, people are earning more money, buying more goods, enjoying higher standards of living and – a fatal impediment to the ideal of communality – becoming more individualistic. No one objects, save a few puritanical lefties, on the plausible grounds that the survivors of a six-year war and the depression of the 1930s deserve their march to the sunlit uplands of the car show-room and hire-purchase shop, and one of the marks of Johnson’s account of his late 1960s young man about town-hood is his embrace of all this. Keen on solidarity, he also appreciates the lure of TV sets and electric guitars. “I didn’t want to abolish money,” he remarks of the economic theories propounded by Tariq Ali as the students marched on Grosvenor Square. “I needed more of the bloody stuff.” So he did. But all this, inevitably, creates difficulties for anyone bent on social justice. Once people earn more money they tend to want its increase to be exponential. Trades unions want to preserve differentials.

The wealthy argue that they can only supply what the less wealthy want under the banner of laissez-faire. Galloping technology enhances these divisions by limiting the power that a single jurisdiction can exert on the people who trade within its boundaries. The natural consequence of all these developments is a political impasse. Any politician who was seriously interested in social justice would start by proposing not a minimum wage but a maximum wage, and go on to identify the dozens of areas of our lives that cry out for greater intervention by the state. He or she would then recollect just how incompetent the state generally is when charged with effecting these interventions and go back, as Mr Miliband does, and Mr Blair did before him, to talking about fairness.

Linda Edwards, sister of Alan Johnson, describes the Labour man's beginnings | Politics | News | Daily Express POLITICS 'Alan was often the victim of our Dad's drunken rages' Sister reveals rough childhood Sunday Express Political Editor CAROLINE WHEELER speaks to Linda Edwards, sister of Labour's former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who brought up her brother after their mother died 11:33, Sun, Dec 7, 2014 GETTY Alan's often told of his immense gratitude to Linda Alan Johnson's sister, who saved him from being sent into foster care and is the heroine of his best-selling memoirs, cannot hide her pride in her younger brother. Linda Edwards, who was forced to fend for herself and her sibling from the tender age of 16 after the death of their mother, has been thrilled to watch him develop into a statesman despite the obstacles they were forced to overcome as children. Speaking from Perth, in Western Australia, where she runs a nursery, the 67-year-old reveals for the first time how their father, who was a violent drunk, sexually abused her from the age of four.

The abuse became so bad that at one point she lunged at him with a knife, but their mother, Lillian, who died when Alan was just 13, pulled her back. "I honestly wanted to kill my dad," she admits. Linda has never been in the limelight but shot to fame after Alan wrote his best-selling memoir, This Boy, and sequel, Please Mister Postman, in which he revealed how much his sister sacrificed for her family and her obvious devotion and love for him. Their father Steve was a pianist, painter and decorator who gambled and drank heavily. He walked out when Alan was eight, leaving his mother to support the family on the pittance she earned cleaning houses. Lillian, who had a heart condition, never found out about the sexual abuse and it was only when Linda started writing her own memoirs that Alan discovered her horrifying secret. In her book she bravely confesses: "Threats from my father were nothing new to me, as I was keeping a secret that is painful to talk about even today. "He had been sexually abusing me since I was about four years old.

PH Linda wrote her own biography before Alan was asked to write his memoirs Alan was always very brave and would try to fight back "It began one Sunday morning when I hopped into bed with Mum and Dad. Mum got up to make a cup of tea and Alan was asleep in his cot. "That was how it started. As I got older I tried to avoid being alone with him, but he such as when I was off sick found opportunities, such as when I was off sick from school while Mum was at work. "He would say it was because he loved me and that's how daddies showed their love to their little girls. I can still remember his heavy breathing. Once I said I was going to tell Mum if he didn't stop, and he said that if I did, she would have a heart attack and die." Linda, whose book entitled Born For A Reason has never been published, claims she was not the only person to suffer at the hands of their father, who died in 2004. "Alan was often the victim of Dad's drunken rages," she says. "Dad would pretend he was boxing with him, but the punches were real and hard.

He told Alan he was a wimp and he should toughen up and learn to fight, punching as he spoke. "Alan was always very brave and would try to fight back but would sometimes cry, which would make me so angry, then Mum would intervene and get a wallop too." Life only began to look up when Steve finally left the family home in Notting Hill, west London, then largely a slum district, to move in with another woman. "Money was tight, but we were happier without the abuse and arguments," Linda says. The family's newfound happiness was shortlived. In 1964, their mother died following heart surgery, aged 42. She had spent her last six months in hospital, with Linda looking after Alan. PH Christmas 1968 with Alan Johnson, Judy his first wife. and sister Linda Edwards Social services informed the children that Alan was to go to a foster family. Linda, who was working as a nursery nurse, would be sent to work at a Barnardo's home. She dug her heels in and persuaded the council to give them a flat, with their Uncle Jim standing guarantor on the rent.

"There was no way that I was going to let anybody separate us," says Linda. Her brother went to school, she went to work, and they lived off her wage of £2 a week. Alan got a part-time milk round and bought himself a guitar. "I always knew he was going to be famous but I always thought it would be for his music," she says. "Never in a million years did I think he would become a politician." Alan, now 64, left school at 15 and stacked shelves at Tesco before becoming a postman. He married his first wife, Judy, when he was 18 and was a father of three before his 21st birthday. "He quickly became involved with the post office union and spoke up for workers like him who had been laid off with no pay," says Linda. "I remember remarking on the sense of justice and fairness he'd inherited from Mum. It was a sign of things to come." As Alan rose through the ranks of the Union of Communications Workers, which he would eventually lead as General Secretary, the siblings remained close. Linda married her childhood sweetheart, Mike Whitaker, in September 1966.

Mike had come into their lives just as their mother died and became his brother-in-law's hero; the second volume of Alan's bestselling memoir is dedicated to him. However, Mike carried his own heart-breaking secret; he was a functioning alcoholic, something he hid for many years as he and Linda went on to have their own three children. PH At 16 Linda persuaded social services to let Alan stay with her rather than a foster family IT was the departure of their foster children, Ricky and Murray, which Alan believes triggered the tragic chain of events that led to Mike's suicide and left his sister a young widow. Although Linda eventually met and married the "love of her life" Charles, known as Chas, with whom she emigrated to Australia with their children in May 1983, Mike's death was a second tragedy to touch both the sibling's lives. "When these things happened I used to say that I would include them in my book," Linda says. "I never knew if I would ever get around to doing anything about it." It wasn't until Alan entered politics that she entertained the idea of writing her book, which has been seen by the Sunday Express.

"It was when he entered the deputy leadership race and reporters began asking me about our childhood that I started to think about writing the book and I started it when Alan became Home Secretary," she says. "When it was finished I sent it to him to look at just to check there was nothing he was unhappy about. He showed it to a few people to see if there was any interest in publishing it and it was suggested that he write his own memoirs. "I agreed, so mine never went to press and until now only my friends and family have read my story." "Even though we could have gone off the rails when Mum died, we are doing exactly what she would have wanted: making a difference to the people around us.

"She would be extremely proud of him for getting where he is today." Related articles Ed Miliband approached me for a job, says Alan Johnson - Telegraph Politics Ed Miliband approached me for a job, says Alan Johnson Mr Johnson, who was a Cabinet minister in the last Labour government, discloses he turned down a job in the shadow Cabinet earlier this year Please, Mr Postman is Alan Johnson's second volume of memoirs Photo: Jeff Gilbert By Christopher Hope , Senior Political Correspondent 6:00AM GMT 01 Dec 2014 Comments Alan Johnson has disclosed that he recently turned down an appeal by Ed Miliband to return the shadow cabinet as he criticised the Labour leader for not taking the Chancellor to task over the economy. Mr Johnson, who was shadow Chancellor under Mr Miliband for seven months from 2010 to 2011, expressed exasperation that Labour had not been more effective in attacking Chancellor George Osborne over the economy in an interview in GQ magazine. He told GQ’s interviewer, Tony Blair’s former spin-doctor Alistair Campbell, that Mr Miliband should make “a couple of big speeches ... just taking the whole thing apart”.

He said: “If I feel frustrated about anything it is about not holding George Osborne to account, because his flagship policy was to clear the deficit in one term. He has totally failed.” The former home secretary said he was approached by the Labour leader earlier this year but turned down the offer of a new frontline role. Related Articles Ed Miliband attempts to win back Yes voters in Scotland 28 Nov 2014 “Ed said to me a few months ago ‘I suppose you’re not interested in coming back?’. I said ‘No,” said Mr Johnson who now has he said in an interview with Alastair Campbell for GQ magazine. He said he had been surprised when Mr Miliband offered him the post of shadow chancellor after becoming leader in 2010 and admitted that he had not enjoyed the job. “I was glad to get out. I took it because I thought, what an extraordinary gesture, that he wants me there. I was not associated with him (Mr Miliband), I’m very much a Blairite, I had not been planning to go on the front bench. But my heart wasn't in it. I was not up for it.

I did it for seven months but I didn't like the job.” Mr Johnson has previously ruled himself out as a contender for the Labour leadership, despite pressure from MPs who believe they would stand a much better chance in next year's general election if he replaced Mr Miliband. He insisted the party could win in May, despite Mr Miliband’s dismal poll-ratings, and said he had told the Labour leader he would be happy “to go round the country, campaigning, talking to parties during the election. He indicated, however, that he could even be tempted back to the frontbench if Labour succeeded in regaining power. “Disgracefully - and it is disgraceful because I won't have done the heavy lifting - then I would be more interested. But I am not gagging for it,” he said. Since standing down as shadow chancellor in 2011 after discovering his wife was having an affair with his police protection officer, Mr Johnson has carved out a successful second career as a writer, penning two best-selling volumes of his autobiography.

2200 Sunday November 30 The news came as Mr Miliband said that the “abject failure” of the Government’s economic policies had cost the Exchequer tens of billions of pounds in lost revenues. The Labour leader cited figures from the House of Commons Library which, it said, showed that lower-than-expected tax receipts and ballooning social security payments had cost £116.5billion over the course of the parliament. The loss was the equivalent of almost £4,000 for every taxpayer - resulting in higher borrowing and the failure of Chancellor George Osborne to meet his promise to clear the deficit by the time of the general election in May, Labour said. According to the figures income tax receipts were £66 billion lower than forecast, national insurance contributions were down £25.5 billion while social security spending is £25 billion higher than originally planned. Mr Miliband will say at an event in Nottignham today that millions of families remain trapped in "the most prolonged cost-of-living crisis for a century". He is expected to say: “For them this is a joy-less and pay-less recovery.

“The Government’s failure to build a recovery that works for every-day people and tackle the cost-of-living crisis isn't just bad for every person affected, it also hampers our ability to pay down the deficit. “Britain's public finances have been weakened by a Tory-led Government overseeing stagnant wages which keep tax revenues low. “The result has been David Cameron and George Osborne missing every single target they set themselves on clearing the deficit and balancing the books by the end of this parliament.” Raise your glasses to these sparkling reads... chosen by the Mail's superstars | Daily Mail Online Raise your glasses to these sparkling reads... chosen by the Mail's superstars A well-chosen book is the perfect present - so from now until Christmas we'll be bringing you a weekly selection of the year's best titles. The Mail's columnists launch the festivities by revealing what they've most enjoyed reading this year… Festive picks: Our columnists reveal the best books they read this year Richard Littlejohn Last year, I chose former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson's This Boy as my book of 2013. This year, it's his follow-up memoir, Please, Mr Postman (Bantam, £16.99) , that enchanted me.

The latest instalment is less harrowing than Johnson's frank, sometimes uncomfortable account of his impoverished childhood in West London. It follows his passage from postman to full-time trades union official. Enchanting: Richard Littlejohn, left, enjoyed the memoirs of former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson It evokes a mundane, forgotten era of Sunday morning football and drinks at the British Legion, of relative hardship and class solidarity, when the unions were still a force in the land and a council house was a step up in the world. Unlike Ed Miliband, Johnson speaks human. He's been there, got the capped-sleeved T-shirt, which is why so many traditional Labour supporters would have loved to see him as their leader. He relates to working people in a way the Islington set can't even begin to comprehend. But why would he want to extend his successful political career when he can write so movingly for a wider audience? Roll on part three.

Sebastian Shakespeare: Lorrie Moore's short stories had him hooked Sebastian Shakespeare Bark (Faber, £14.99) is Lorrie Moore's first collection of short stories in 16 years and you'll be hooked from the very first line: 'Ira had been divorced six months and still couldn't get his wedding ring off.' A lot of the stories are about marital breakdown, middle-aged dating and the passage of time. But although the subject matter is downbeat, humour is never far from the surface. Epigrams linger in the mind long after you close the book. Her definition of a modern man? One who knows how to stop and ask for directions. Not that there is any need to stop and ask for directions when you read her. She takes you by the hand and maps out the terrain of the human heart with elegance, compassion and wit. Peter McKay His beyond-crazy creation, Sergeant Dudley Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department, investigates the 1941 murder of a Japanese family in LA just as Emperor Hirohito's air forces sink half the U.S. Fleet based at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii.

Favourite read: Peter McKay chose James Ellroy's Perfidia Smith was played by James Cromwell in the movie version of Ellroy's previous, city-of-angels blockbuster LA Confidential. Amusingly, Cromwell was also considered perfect for the role of HM's consort, Prince Philip, in The Queen. Witty, fond of ornate language, ruthless Smith sees policing as a business. He breaks strikes for (real life) movie boss Harry Cohn, to whom he also supplies sleazy gossip. 'I have a grand assortment for you today,' he informs the creepy magnate. Rita Hayworth is canoodling (not Ellroy's description) with 'a heroically hung drifter named Sailor Jack Woods…' while 'District Attorney McPherson has been frequently spotted at Minnie Roberts' Casbah, a noted whorehouse'. Dudley Smith speeds on Benzedrine pep pills and cigarettes. One wonders what fuels Ellroy's rampaging, machine-gun prose.

Spine-tingling: Sarah Vine chose a book guaranteed to give you the shivers on a cold winter's night Sarah Vine Part coffee-table book, part scholarly treatise, Leslie S.Klinger's The Annotated HP Lovecraft (Liveright, £25) is a feast for both diehard fans and those unfamiliar with the man described by Stephen King as 'the 20th century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale'. It brings together 22 of Lovecraft's most eerie tales, including The Call Of Cthulhu, The Colour Out Of Space and my personal favourite, At The Mountains Of Madness, setting them in a cultural and literary context and exploring the wider associations of Lovecraft's writing. That makes it sound a bit dry; it's not. The actual book is as vivid as the stories themselves, and beautiful to boot, with its inky black cover and gold embossed tentacles. Perfect for anyone who enjoys exploring the outer regions of the imagination — and guaranteed to give you the shivers on a cold winter's night.

Jonathan Pugh I've read a number of books this year, but the one that surprised me the most, and will live longest in the memory was Things Fall Apart (Penguin Classics, £8.99), by Chinua Achebe . Will live in the memory: Jonathan Pugh was moved by Things Fall Apart A deceptively simple and unsentimental tale, from an African perspective, of the arrival of English Christian missionaries to a Nigerian village in the late 1800s and the cultural chaos that followed. Don't be tempted to give up after the first few pages like I was! It's only 200 pages long, but has a quiet power and majesty about it — and every so often thumps you right in the solar plexus. The perfect present to give to someone who's thinking of invading somewhere. Gratitude and Trust changed Jaci's life Jaci Stephen There is a category of book I consign every year to the 'Yeah, Whaddever' list: the ones that promise you they will change your life, do so for a week, and then get thrown to the NYD pile (No, You Didn't).

Gratitude And Trust (Blue Rider Press) is, however, a book that will change your life. Although co-author Paul Williams is an alcoholic and writes about his experience from that standpoint, co-writer Tracey Jackson (who is also, by the way, a brilliant screenwriter) is not. Together, they have produced a remarkable, life-enhancing work that shows how change really comes about. It transformed my life in two pages. Seriously. Rhian Elizabeth's semi autobiographical Six Pounds Eight Ounces is a first novel and is witty, heart-wrenching and, in its soul searching, an ultimately uplifting read from the pen of someone who knows they screwed up — and came through. The result of that learning is a truly exhilarating book. Jan Moir Epic read: Jan Moir chose The Son The Son by Philipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster, £7.99) is a multi-generational historical novel set in the badlands of Texas where Comanche, Mexicans and the white folks seem determined to kill each other, or die in the attempt. Cowboys and Indians, buckskin and sweaty horses, oil and cattle, grandpappy and land leases?

That sounds like everything I loathe to read, right there in one handy volume. Yet this meticulously researched book, which begins in 1836 and ends in 2012, has an extraordinary power and narrative sweep. It is an unforgettable read, a masterful chronicle of five generations of the McCullough family struggling against a backdrop of terrible damage, both within the soul and without. As one character says: 'The story of the human race is soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do.' Epic, in every way. Andrew Pierce In her debut detective novel former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe has drawn on her hilarious antics in Strictly Come Dancing. There is a professional trouper, Beautella LaReine, and a backstage murder on televised dance contest Lively Toes, which is more than you can say for Widdecombe's when she was on Strictly in 2010. Andrew Pierce was entertained by Ann Widdecombe's book as much as he was by her dancing on Strictly The Dancing Detective (£6.99) is published through Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing arm.

Set in Dartmoor, where she has lived since she quit Westminster, there is a clever twist at the end. As for the 'hideously conceited' politician, I suspect he is a cross between the saintly Widdecombe's old nemesis former Tory leader Michael Howard and David Cameron. Baz Bamigboye Another vote: Baz was also a fan of Please, Mister Postman There are few British politicians who have had the kind of hard-knock life that Alan Johnson, former Labour Home Secretary, endured. Please, Mister Postman , the second volume of Johnson's memoirs, charts his marriage at 17, fatherhood, and his fascinating self-education where he learnt on the job almost as he walked the streets as a postman and rose in the union ranks. He's like a Billy Elliot of politicians in that he worked, against considerable odds, from the ground up for his success. He enjoyed a laugh and a shout with the lads and was close to his family, but suffered pain which fell drop by drop on the heart, to borrow from Aeschylus, when tragedies struck.

His canniness and likeability as a politician comes, I believe, from a desire to treat everyone the same while at the same time holding something of himself back. The book is about how a man without privilege lived his life. That toxic elitist word that gets bandied about so much certainly does not apply to him. Also, Johnson genuinely knows his rock 'n' roll and that certainly gets my vote, big time. Bel Mooney I'd rave about prize-winners like The Narrow Road To The Deep North by Richard Flanagan and H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald , but will look elsewhere for my picks. Another fan: Bel could rave about The Man Booker prize winning The Narrow Road To The Deep North by Richard Flanagan, right Looking forward to Rachel Joyce's The Love Song Of Miss Queenie Hennessy (Doubleday, £14.99) I wasn't disappointed. This tender, funny tragic novel guides you to a point of emotion rarely found in modern fiction and the wonderful ending is truly uplifting. Since art and poetry are my passions, I was bound to love Adrian Henri: Total Artist.

The poet and painter and performer died in 2000, and this collection of essays, poems, history and wonderful illustrations captures the wild and wacky Liverpool scene of the Sixties and Seventies and the spirit of a multi-talented genius and total dude. Simon Heffer Simon Heffer recommends The English And Their History Many have tried to write a single-volume history of England, but few have succeeded, and none I can think of has succeeded quite so well as Robert Tombs, whose 1,000-page The English And Their History (Allen Lane, £35) takes the story from before the Romans to the present day. Prof Tombs is a historian of France, but he brings both a rigorously scholarly method and a sense of perspective to a history that is sensible, thorough and highly educational, and which will inform even the cleverest of clogs who read it. I've spent much of my spare time lately reading Arnold Bennett, whom Virginia Woolf snobbishly despised but who makes a convincing case for being one of the great English novelists of the 20th century.

His Clayhanger trilogy (1910-16) is a masterpiece and perfect for long winter evenings, but few novels have more verve than The Card (1911), which gave our language the phrase 'the great cause of cheering us all up'. Mac I met Sheila Hancock when she came to the Chelsea Arts Club to promote and sign copies of her new novel Miss Carter's War (Bloomsbury, £12.99). She is an immensely likeable lady with a wonderful talent to entertain and an ability to write. Brilliantly wriiten: Cartoonist Mac recommends Sheila Hancock's Miss Carter's War I bought her novel and also an earlier book, Just Me, a very poignant and moving account of her life after the death of her husband the actor John Thaw. She spurned grannying and gardening and instead set off on a series of journeys, which she writes about with such clarity and enthusiasm that I long to see these places for myself. It is a book about love and loss and moving on. Funny, touching and brilliantly written. I can't wait to start reading Miss Carter's War. I know I'm in for a treat.

Craig Brown History buff: Craig Brown The great historian of London, Jerry White, gave us two real crackers this year. Zeppelin Nights (Bodley Head, £25) showed the vast impact of the Great War on the capital, particularly around the railway stations, to which many would return as invalids, and from which many hundreds of thousands would depart, never to return. I loved, too, his lovely little book for Everyman, London Stories. It's a thoughtful selection of fiction and non-fiction, some familiar, like Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure Of The Blue Carbuncle and John Evelyn's account of the Great Fire, and some unfamiliar (at least to me) such as Henry Mayhew's interview with a desperately poor Victorian Watercress Girl, and Thackeray's vivid account of watching a public hanging. No one who reads the last two will ever again think wistfully of a return to Victorian values. Quentin Letts Old favourite: Quentin Letts still enjoys reading When The Green Woods Laugh Keen modernist that I am, I read (and relished) H. E. Bates's 1960 comic novel When The Green Woods Laugh .

This is one of the Darling Buds Of May series featuring Pop and Ma Larkin. Bates's prose could be liquid, it flows so easily. What a peachy tale. You sense the pomposity-pricking Larkins would have got on well with Tory peer Lady Trumpington. Her memoirs, Coming Up Trumps (Macmillan, £16.99), not only had a few moments of prize slapstick but were also written with an enviable, slightly ginny nonchalence for convention. They didn't tell us much about politics, but they did tell us a lot about this magnificent lady. The story about how, as a public-school headmaster's wife, she jumped into the swimming pool one speech day is pure St Trinian's. To buy any book reviewed here, visit or call 0808 272 0808. For reviews and news go to

Question: Please, Mister Postman is the second volume of memoirs by which current politician?
Answer: Alan Johnson